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Friday, July 6, 2012

'Savages' Movie Review

Taylor Kitsch needs a hit like a crackhead. So far this year
the “Friday Night Lights” alum has been in “John Carter” and “Battleship”, two
of the biggest critical and financial disasters in recent movie history. He
needs something to get him out of the gutter. Unfortunately for him, “Savages”,
Oliver Stone’s adaptation of Don Winslow’s 2010 novel, won’t be that movie. The
Day-Glo film noir is too violent to attract massive mainstream audiences—at times
the film edges dangerously near torture porn. Stone has an eye for visual style,
there is some striking imagery, but in the end there is very little in the way
of substance.

After opening with a camcorder shot of a bunch of frightened
hostages, followed by the sound of a chainsaw, “Savages” dives into a
wishy-washy voiceover from O (Blake Lively). She proclaims that just because
she’s telling this story, doesn’t mean that she’s alive at the end. An attempt
to create a metaphysical edge, this kind of indecisiveness permeates the entire
film, up to and including one of the most bullshit endings to a movie you’ve
ever seen.

O, short for Ophelia, is part of a threesome. She’s in love
with two men, best friends and polar opposites Ben (Aaron Johnson, “Kick-Ass”)
and Chon (Kitsch). Ben is a peace-loving hippie. Chon is an army vet who misses
the action. Ben makes love, Chon has “wargasms”, and this dichotomy defines
them. Together they’re supposed to be one perfect man, but you spend most of
the film wondering how they’re actually friends. Different personality types
can certainly be close, but these two are so contrary that you hardly believe
one can stomach the other, let alone run a successful marijuana growing/distribution
business together.

When a brutal Mexican drug cartel attempts to bring Ben and
Chon’s enterprise under their umbrella, things go south and the trio find
themselves in a full-scale battle for survival. The problem is that you don’t
actually care about anyone in “Savages”. O is kidnapped, Ben and Chon have to
save her by any means necessary—an option Chon enjoys, but that Ben abhors. You’re
supposed to believe that their all so in love that the guys are willing to do
anything and everything to bring O back, but all you have to rely on is O’s
hokey narration that tells you this, because from all appearances they just
like to get high and fuck.

The script tries to make characters interesting, and
layered, but what it succeeds in doing is making them jumbled, flighty, and
inconsistent. Elena (Salma Hayek) heads the cartel. She’s a cold, calculating
killer, but also a mother who loves her daughter. Instead of adding complexity
to her personality she bounces around from trying to intimidate you to talking
to her daughter about horseys. In theory this humanizes her, but it really
makes her annoying and significantly less frightening. John Travolta, who looks
like a bullfrog these days, plays a crooked DEA agent. He has a wife with
cancer. Again, doesn’t make him interesting. He makes a sad face and that’s as
far as that goes.

Lado (Benicio Del Toro) is the most legitimately scary villain
in the movie. At first. Cold as ice early on, like everything else, he goes
wrong and hams it up all the way to the finish. He morphs into a caricature of
a bad guy playing both sides, eventually becoming a buffoon. “Savages” tries to
be a twisted thriller where everyone has an angle, but it, too, becomes an
exaggerated cartoon version of the kind of film it wants to be. After a while
“Savages” is hard to take seriously. You wonder if that was the point, but that
only makes the whole thing an exercise in futility.

“Savages” wastes too much time introducing minor characters,
while it completely neglects others who play similar roles in an arbitrary
fashion. For example, you get a complete dossier on Ben and Chon’s accountant
Spin (Emile Hirsh), but no one on their team of hackers even has a real name,
but are just as important to the story. This is an obvious problem with the
translation from page to screen. You can get away with giving everyone a story
in a 300-page novel, but even in a movie as overly long as “Savages”, that’s
too much. Winslow worked on adapting the script, and you can feel the
flourishes he wanted to keep.

On some level the violence of the “Savages” conflicts with
the drug. Not the business side of things, selling weed on this scale engenders
all manner of nasty consequences. But from a narrative standpoint it feels out
of place. Would you really spark a J before jumping into a guerilla style—rocked
launchers and IEDs—ambush? If a notoriously brutal gang of thugs is hunting you
are you really going to get stoned, pass out, and leave yourself an easy
target? Is that the best plan of action? It had to be pot because Ben’s
personality wouldn’t work with meth or coke (maybe ecstasy or LSD, but the
scale isn’t big enough), but it is an awkward fit.

There is potential in “Savages” for a solid, tough-to-watch
crime thriller, but the film never delivers. Instead it winds up a charade,
almost a spoof of the kind of movie it claims to be. It wants to push buttons,
it wants to incite debate, it wants to have something to say and be more
important that it is. But there’s nothing behind it. The torture scenes are
simply gratuitous and without purpose (and I’m someone who enjoys excessive
violence), the cast makes bad decision after bad decision, and the entire film
amounts to very, very little.